January is the most disappointing of months. The excitement of the holidays is over. We’re back to work with no end in sight. The weather remains dreary. It’s like Demember’s evil twin, with a turtleneck and goatee.
I wrote this song years ago to cheer myself up. Maybe it’ll cheer you up too.
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A while back I posted an article on How to Get Your Game Idea Made into a Game. Since that article appeared I’ve received hundreds of emails telling me about ideas that you’d like to see made into a game.
I appreciate your openness in talking about your ideas with me. I applaud your drive in moving forward and trying to get your ideas made.
But your questions have made me realize that I wasn’t clear enough in my first post. So let me be clear.
Never in a hundred million years will you ever sell your game idea to a company.
Game developers never, ever, ever, ever, ever buy game ideas. Game publishers never, ever, ever, ever, ever buy game ideas.
An awesome new update for Crush the Castle is on its way to the iPhone App Store. The update adds a whole new continent with 40 additional levels, three insane new weapons, improvements to the editor, even faster performance, and more.
If you haven’t tried Crush the Castle on your iPhone or iPod Touch, the free version is a great place to start. If you tried the free version, take another look at the full version—soon with 90 levels and a dozen mind-blowing weapons!
I’m also pleased to announce that as of this week, the free version of Crush the Castle has been downloaded by over a million players. This is a special thrill for my 11-year old son Liam, who designed many of your favorite levels.
Thanks for playing!
This week Crush the Castle hit the top 10 list on the iPhone App Store.
I’ve helped release a dozen iPhone/iPod Touch apps in the last year and a half. Some have made money. Others have tanked. But Crush the Castle is the first to have climbed to the top echelons of iPhone apps. It’s the first to make serious money.
Why is CtC succeeding more than the others? What sets it apart?
I believe that this app has three clear advantages that are working together to propel it up the charts.
Adventure games have enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. Online Flash portals have given the genre a new lease on life. Adventures like The Great Living Room Escape and The Scene of the Crime top the charts of web game sites like ArmorGames.com. What once looked like a dead genre is beginning to attract new players.
A friend sent me a link to Machinarium the other day, a winsome little adventure that won the Excellence in Visual Art award at the 2009 Independent Games Festival. I enjoyed it. I even thought about buying the full version. But playing the demo reminded me of why the adventure genre died in the first place, way back in the late 1990s.
I can’t decide whether to use categories or tags in my Wordpress posts and it’s making me question my place in the universe.
I’m drawn to Categories. They’re the traditional Wordpress mechanism. They’re hierarchical, so if a post is categorized as “programming” it falls under “technology” as well. I like this structure. It’s systematic. Modern.
But the other day I was working on a post about User Interfaces and found I had no category for this topic. But how should I categorize it? Under “design” or under “programming”? The Wordpress category system is single-inheritance, so I had to make a choice. Yet neither choice was correct. “User interface” thwarts such clear right-brain/left-brain delineations. It swims in the soup of ambiguity.
So I found my self drawn to tags. Tags are ad hoc, anarchic, organic. They’re egalitarian, radically democratic. They impose no power structure. Postmodern.
I’m encountering this problem a lot lately. I’m too young to be a Boomer, too old for a Millenial. I’m stuck between the old world of Science and Truth and Control and the new world of Intuition and Ambiguity and Openness.
Every piece of software has its limits. There’s only so much an application or a game or a website can do. You may wish you could double-jump in Halo. You can’t. You may wish you could use a lasso tool to select icons on your desktop. You can’t.
When a user wants an application to do something it can’t, it’s the job of the user interface to tell the user “No.” But there are right and wrong ways for software to say “No.” And when they say it the wrong way, users stop using.
User interface design is a subtle, subtle art. The smallest detail can mean the difference between an application or site that is fun to use or one that grates on the nerves.
I discovered this insight the hard way, by making Flash games and iPhone apps. Often the difference between a successful app and a failed one is a single button out of place, a screen that doesn’t respond quickly enough, a frame rate that skips and hitches.
Time, Inc., in association with The Wonderfactory, has just announced a new eBook reader that is getting people excited. Could this be the end of print media such as books and magazines? You can check out the video below.
Exciting. Apparently. But, you know, in over fifteen years of working with cutting-edge technology I’ve seen a lot of would-be revolutions come and go. And I’ve noticed something. Marketing videos often change the world more than the products that they anticipate.
And so, I believe, it will be with this video. I don’t see anything here that makes me think the media universe is about to explode.
Last time I listed the main biblical passages dealing with divorce and remarriage. I also previewed some of the conclusions I had come to when studying these passages.
But now let’s clear our minds, forget everything we (think we) know about divorce and rediscover what the Bible says with fresh eyes. Today we’ll look at Old Testament passages that deal with these topics.
